Brigitte Boisselier

Chemist

Born: 1956

Birthplace: France

Best known as: Scientific Director of Clonaid, a human cloning service

Dr. Brigitte Boisselier is the scientific director of Clonaid, a company devoted to creating human clones. Based in the Bahamas, Clonaid is funded by the Raëlian Movement, a quasi-religious organization which believes that humans were scientifically created by extraterrestrials. Clonaid includes two other divisions: Clonapet, a service for cloning dear departed companion animals, and Insureaclone, a service designed to preserve the DNA of living people for future cloning. In early 2001 Bosselier told a U.S. congressional committee that Clonaid would delay actual cloning until legal issues had been settled. Later that year the company moved its operations out of the United States, and in August of 2001 the U.S. House of Representatives banned human cloning. On 27 December 2002 Boisselier announced that Clonaid had successfully cloned the first human, a girl known as Eve who was born on 26 December at an undisclosed location. Scientists greeted the announcement with skepticism, but Boisselier claimed that proof of the baby's arrival would be provided early in 2003.

Extra credit: We have not determined Boisselier's exact date of birth; according to Agence France-Presse, Boisselier was born in France in 1956 and holds a master's degree in biochemistry and doctorates in chemistry from the University of Dijon in France and the University of Houston in Texas... She has served as a visiting professor at Hamilton College in New York... Bosselier has said her adult daughter is among the surrogate mothers that will be used for the cloning... The baby Eve presumably is named after the biblical figure of Eve.